Why short forces are short and why do physicists love equivocation so much?

0. Matt Strassler wrote a dumbed down popularization (“Why short range forces short range?”) that needs further deconstruction to be comprehensible.

2. Strassler has a tendency to overcomplicate what he tries to simplify for his lay readers by trying to coin cute words like "wavicle" in order to avoid mathematics or rather to protect his lay readers from the proprietary language physicists call “mathematics”.

In scholastic fields such as academic physics one of the highest rewards a professional physicist can hope to have is to coin a word that all his colleagues accept and use. Of course, the top reward is to have a physical unit named after you but for this you need to be a dead white male. After all, there are only a limited number of units that can be named but anyone can invent a new word such as “wavicle” and try to make it accepted into the physics jargon. You may obtain more professional points by establishing a new name then having published 100 papers in high prestige scholarly journals.

It looks like so far Strassler is the only one using the cute word “wavicle” because this is not really a new physical quantity but a new name for an old concept, namely, wave-particle duality. Strassler is just playing naming games.

3. The problem for me is that in physics fundamental words like field, wave and particle are equivocations. These words have at least two meanings, one valid in the "classical" realm and one valid in the "quantum" realm.

4. Just as Aristotelians divided the world into the terrestrial and celestial realms, each governed by distinct rules, modern physicists have partitioned the universe into two separate domains governed by different physical laws (three, if we include General Relativity). It is no surprise, then, that physicists have spent over a century attempting to "unify" these conceptual silos they have created—so far without success.

5. In the case of waves, the word “wave” refers to two fundamentally different entities both called waves. One of the waves can be "scaled up and down" arbitrarily and the other has a limit on how much it can be scaled down. These are two different entities.

6. The unit of study in physics for millennia has been the "particle" or the "atom".

7. Particles were defined as the indivisible units that made up the world. Physicists called these units "matter". Newton formalized this atomic materialist worldview and added his supernatural universal cause of all motion acting between particles and setting them in motion. Newton called this universal occult cause "force" and by propaganda he had the world accept his supernatural cause as a physical cause. Huygens, Leibniz and in our time Einstein all recognized that Newton’s “force” was a supernatural cause and criticized Newton for introducing occult causes to physics. But Newtonism won because Newton had successfully established his own school based on his supernatural cause he called “force”. Newton replaced Aristotle as the master of European scholasticism and his disciples filled in the gaps in Newton’s Principia and created the consistent system of units we know today as “Newtonian mechanics.” Newtonism also won over Einstein’s attempts to replace Newton’s occult force with his own gravitational theories that did not include supernatural causes, that is, his General Theory of Relativity.

8. But experiments done in the early 20th century confused physicists and they decided that the unit of study of physics must be fields not particles.

10. But physicists never dumped the word particle.

11. They started to call some properties of fields such as excitations "particles" and thus entered the realm of scholastic sophistry and proved that an atomic materialist worldview is the unquestionable dogma of physics. All experiments, regardless of what they say, must be interpreted to support the dogma of atomic materialism. Even if this can only be done by the sophistry of calling waves “particles”.

12. I think physicists' real problem is a professional problem not physics problem. They've been doing business as "particle physicists" for such a long time that they are unwilling to change their professional title to "field physicists" or "excitations of the field physicists" instead they keep changing the meaning of the word particle to save their professional title.

comment at HN 21.1.25

Your comment is helpful, thanks. I also discussed this with chatgpt and he said similar things: “Strassler’s term "indivisible waves" seems to be his unique phrasing to make these ideas more intuitive for a lay audience. Physicists usually use more formal language, such as ‘quantized excitations of a field’ or ‘wave-particle duality.’

But my problem is different.

Below I use the word “particle” to mean “a three dimensional indivisible unit,” and nothing else. A particle is not a mathematical point as Strassler suggests when he describes a particle as a “dot.” And a particle is not a wave. If Strassler decides to call waves “particles”, waves do not magically become particles. Ever since the scientific revolution we have not explained natural phenomena by magic.

I read Strassler quote again: 

In a quantum world such as ours, the field’s waves are made from indivisible tiny waves, which for historical reasons we call “particles.” Despite their name, these objects aren’t little dots...

My interpretation of this quote is like this:

> In a quantum world such as ours the field’s waves are made from indivisible tiny waves...

This means that the world is made of quantum fields and fields are waves and not particles [particle are indivisible units, Strassler calls them “little dots”].

This is a clear statement. Strassler is saying that our world is quantum and it is made of fields. Fields are not particles. The unit of study of physics is now fields, not particles. There are no particles in this world because the field is made of waves. These waves are not particles. But they differ from the classical waves because they can only be scaled down to a certain length.

> ...which for historical reasons we call “particles”. Despite their name these objects aren’t little dots [they are not indivisible units with extension].

Strassler’s quote makes it clear that the building blocks of the world are waves, not particles. In this world of ours there are no particles in the sense of indivisible units. It is only that Strassler chooses to call these waves “particles.” This is just a naming convention.

If someone decides to call “monkey” the animal we know and love as a “donkey”, obviously the long eared cute animal will not become a monkey just because someone decided to call it “monkey”. This play on words can only create confusion. If we are calling an animal with the name of another animal we are only exposing ourself as a sophist.

This is exactly what Strassler is doing. He is intentionally trying to corrupt the meanings of well established words by loading them with new meanings. He is playing naming games. Calling a wave particle does not make the wave a particle. Then why call a wave particle? No sane person would call a wave “particle” unless he has something to hide and wants to deceive us or even deceive himself.

To me, if true, the fact that the building blocks of the world are waves is a big and fundamental discovery because it proves that the world is not atomic and matterful as Newton assumed. There are no forces acting between particles because particles do not exist.

This is where the problem lies for physicists. Atomic materialism is their professional dogma and they need to save it despite the experiments contradicting it. But this dogma cannot be saved by using sophistry and calling waves particles.

 

Shampoos and spacetimes

Physicists use the word “spacetime” as if it were a well-defined entity with unique properties. There are more branded spacetimes than there are shampoo brands.

There is a shampoo for each type of hair. You have oily hair, there is a shampoo for it. You are pregnant, and there is a shampoo for pregnant women, helping you to have the best looking hair during pregnancy.

Same with spacetimes. Visit the Einsteinium Spacetimes Supermarket and in the shelves you can find a spacetime for the requirements of any academic paper. Do you need a stationary spacetime, there is one just for you. This simple spacetime will solve your stationary spacetime needs very efficiently.

Maybe you need an asymptotically flat spacetime because you just bought a shiny new black hole from our Singularities Department and you need a matching asymptotically flat spacetime, then you are in the right place. Einsteinium has it for you.

Maybe you need spherically symmetric spacetimes. You are a beginner and you are writing your first spacetimes paper and you are too nervous and you wanted a simple spacetime. We have you covered with our spherically symmetric spacetime.

If you cannot decide which Lambda to use for your Cosmological Constant, our Cosmological Constants shelves are the best stocked in the industry; we have the usual zero, positive and negative Lambdas but also many many more; for instance, you can try our Lamda gauged to a variable Newtonian constant G which is well suited for Multiscale Diffusion spacetimes. Be the first to try this exciting new product in your institution.

Maybe you are a mid-career spacetimeologist and you need a spacetime conforming to the quality specifications of the Petrov classifications system, then we recommend a Petrov type II spacetime. But don’t use Petrov type I spacetimes because it has been shown with a definitive null experiment that Petrov type I spacetimes clearly violate General Relativity’s Type LXCDM-II Einsteinian Railroad Embankment Simultaneity Paradox Anomaly. So stay away from it. (You see, we have a great customer service and each and every one of our sales force has a PhD on Spacetimeology. Don’t hesitate to ask any questions that you may have on any products we sell.)

We have many spacetimes on sale. You might want to look at them and buy them in bulk to be used later in any boilerplate spacetimes paper you may need to churn out in the future.

Good news! Our Minkowsky spacetimes are on sale. Minkowsky spacetime is one of the oldest spacetimes, the spacetime that started it all, and it is on sale now. In fact, if you buy Thick Branes Type Warped spacetimes we’ll throw in a Minkowsky spacetime for you.

On our upscale spacetimes shelves, you can find organic, hand made, Bianchi type spacetimes. Buy one, you won’t regret it.

We also have very nice exotic spacetimes. One is called the classic Newtonian spacetime where space and time are absolute; we have a spacetime without the space coordinates, real exotic stuff; and we have spacetimes with space, time, vacuum, mass, multiverse and quintessence coordinates all combined in a Cartesian Vortexial Coordinate System. This is the Swiss Army Knife of spacetimes, all values can be adjusted with steampunk-type knobs. Just to understand the Cartesian Vortexial Coordinates System you will need half a century of study in a monastery in the French countryside. 

But we have plain vanilla spacetimes too. One is coordinateless spacetime, this is the anti-reified coordinate system, there are no reified coordinates, no space and no time. This spacetime is suitable only for blackholes that were approved by Hawking before he died. We have a spacetime used by NASA where only photographable black holes live. This is very expensive because it is a proprietary spacetime. Ask your institution for availability.

We have all kinds of reference frames. Inertial and otherwise. We stock the best inertial frames in the industry with the best official General Relativistic observers wearing the official lab coats with Einstein’s portrait on the back done in the style of the famous Che Guevera poster. After all Einstein was no less revolutonary than Che. These obervers observe using only the best quality Zeiss-made observational tools. These officially sanctioned observers only use simultaneity gauges made simultaneously in China and Germany. Nothing but the best. All your simultaneity needs is covered in Einsteinium, the market of choice of all discerning spacetimeologists.

Do you like Gowdy spacetimes? We have it. We have this type of spacetime in two flavors: Polarised and non-polarized. You can mix and match Gowdy spacetimes with Multiwarped spacetimes (either polarized or not). The possibilities are endless.

If you are in a classical mood, you can have our Riemannian spacetimes and complete it with a Gödel-type spacetime and publish a nice looking paper without even trying.

And finally, if you are a real connoiseur of spacetimes and a fan of homogeneity and isotropy you may try the spacetime with the best provenance ever: the Friedmann–Lemaître–Robertson–Walker spacetime. 

# # #

And then a physicist can write a sentence like this: 

«The ultimate origin of the speed of light limit lies in the structure of spacetime.»

Which spacetime? 

Which fabric of which spacetime? 

All shampoos at least have something in common: water. The fabric of all shampoos have water in it. But the spacetimes in the spacetimes zoo have nothing in common. They were invented to be different so that their inventors could collect some academic points. They were just invented out of the blue. 

“Out of the blue” meaning, “Einstein’s Field Equations” because you can massage Einstein’s Equations to get any solution you want. Einstein’s equations is the goose that lays golden spacetimes for golden careers. The large number of spacetimes mentioned above proves this fact. So, the mantra “according to Einstein’s Equations” means nothing more than “I made up some spacetimes to fit my needs”.

“Spacetime” is the best example of scholastic hair splitting. You take an innocent word and corrupt it by loading it with infinite number of meanings. This is casuistry, the favorite tool of scholastic doctors of philosophy and theology since the beginning of time. Load a word with multiple meanings and pick and choose a meaning that confirms to what you want to prove in your paper. Casuistry can’t fail.

And hair splitting in physics is not limited to spacetimes. How many species of Big Bangs are there, do you know? Hot, cold, tepid Big Bangs... just to name a few. Then there is vacuum with its countless species. Let’s not forget black holes. There are so many species of black holes that even physicists cannot name them all. The list of “physical” concepts hair-split to charlatanism goes on and on. 

Disgusting! I don’t know what other word describes modern academic physics.

References:

1. Stationary spacetime

2. Asymptotically flat spacetime

3. Spherically symmetric spacetimes

4. Petrov type II spacetime

5. Minkowsky spacetime

6. Thick Branes Type Warped spacetime

7. Bianchi type spacetime

8. Gowdy spacetime

9. Multiwarped spacetime

10. Riemannian spacetime

11. Friedmann–Lemaître–Robertson–Walker spacetime

History of Research

1. Forty years ago; I came across a book called “The Moon Has No Rotation”. This book was written and self-published by someone called T.W. Dow. If Mr. Dow lived today, he would have been a blogger. Apparently he was not a professional physicist and instead of repeating the official Newtonian explanation, he was questioning it. This is how I learned about Newton and his miracle.

2. It seemed that Newton discovered something called «Newton's force of gravity» and he explained everything in nature with this force. This is what physics textbooks said.

3. Further research showed that this force was defined as something that traveled from one object to another without time passing. The force crossed vast distances in zero time and  set other objects in motion without touching them.

4. This was absurd. In this world nothing happens without time passing.

5. Newton's force acted without time passing, therefore Newton's force could not be a natural cause of motion. Newton defined his force as a supernatural miracle.

6. I believed as a principle that no new motion can be created in this world; motion can only be transferred.

7. But Newton's force created new motion in distant objects. For an object to change its motion another motion must be transferred to it. The only way to transfer motion is by contact.

8. As a corallary, motion is not diminishing or disappearing; it only changes form and it changes dimensions. When a car breaks, it comes to a stop, meaning that it transfer all its motion to friction and heat. Nothing is lost. What is not created cannot be lost.

9. Newton's force is defined as a cause that lives outside of time and creates new motion from a distance without contact.

10. I refused to accept Newton’s force as a cause of natural phenomena. 

11. Instead, I accept my two principles as fundamental and want to prove that Newton could not have calculated the orbits of planets by using a supernatural agent he called force:

Principle 1: Motion can only be transferred; no new motion can be created.

Corrollary: No motion ever disappears; it only changes form.

Principle 2: Nothing happens without time passing.

Corollary: “Time is passing” is another way of saying “something is happenning”.

12. Since Newton’s force was a supernatural miracle, I firmly believed that, orbits cannot be calculated with it.

13. Physicists will never accept that Newwton’s force is supernatural. What else do you expect from people who name this miracle’s unit after Newton! Physicists make this childish argument that: “we don’t know how this force works, but it works so it works. So let’s crown this miracle with Newton’s name.” Naming a miracle with Newton’s name does not make it any less miraculous.

14. In textbooks, I saw that physicists compute planetary orbits by using Newton's force. It all worked perfectly. Physicists reasoned that they computed orbits by using Newton's force, therefore, Newton's force must exist and orbits must be dynamical. Physicists ignore the truth that miracles cannot explain natural phenomena. 

15. I knew physicists’ reasoning was wrong but I could not see any holes in textbook Newtonism.

16. I couldn't solve my puzzle by reading physics textbooks. How can you compute planetary orbits with a supernatural and absurd miracle and get the correct results?

17. So, I decided to read Newton's original writings.

18. That wasn't easy. Newton’s disciples completely rewrote Newton's original calculations and filled the gaps, rationalized all logical absurdities, formalized Newton’s childish and/or awkward proofs, that is, streamlined the Principa and expressed everything in it in the form of equations, that is, with standard units. Newton, worked only with ratios and proportions. He did not use standard units. He wrote most of his proofs as a mixture of verbal statements and proportionalities.

19. I attempted to read the Principia several times and failed miserably.

20. Newton's Principia is a hotchpotch of propositions and proofs, mostly wrong, or childish; proof by authority abound; and a network of cross references make anybody trying to read this book dizzy. And finally, you admit to yoursef that this guy must be a genius? Genius but of what? Genius of obstructionism, of polemics and sophistry; a genius of self aggrendisement and a genius of propaganda.

21. Then I thought that since Newton's book contained geometrical looking figures I needed to learn Euclidean geometry to decipher Newton’s propositions. Newton claimed that he proved his force of gravity with the rigor of classical geometry, then he applied his proofs to phenomena and calculated orbits with this force that he claimed he discovered. This is all self-serving propaganda. All the proofs in Book I and Book II are exagerated air guitar motions because none of that is used in Book III to compute orbits. Newton computed orbits with a simple application of Kepler’s Rule.

22. My mistake was to try to read the Principia from the beginning to end. Because Newton pretended to prove propositions by using rigorous mathematics and then pretended to apply his proofs to observations. This is nonsense. Ninety percent of the Principia is filler. 

23. At this point I was about to give up. I was not interested in Newton's calculations of the speed of sound (wrong) or his childish calculations on how ships float (totally wrong)... I was only interested in finding out how Newton computed orbits.

24. One day I was browsing in the library and I saw a book called “Newton's Principia: The Central Argument” by Dana Densmore. This was the turning point.

25. Dana Densmore explained Newton's cryptic proofs step by step, filling in the details Newton left off. Finally, the secrets of Principia were revealed to me.

26. In the Principia there are only six propositions where Newton computes planetary orbits (Propositions I.57, I.58, I.59, I60, III.4 and III.8). Newton's disciples developed the “Newtonian mechanics” from these six propositions. This is how scholasticism works. Master of the cult writes one sentence and his disciples multiply it to one million sentences of commentary in order to advance in the career ladder of scholastic hiererchy.

27. After I read Densmore's proofs and understood what Newton did, I clearly saw that Newton did not use a force term in his calculations of orbits. Newton used Kepler's Rule. Nothing else. Kepler's Rule does not have a force term.

28. What is Kepler's Rule?

29. At that time I knew about Kepler's Rule but I did not know how fundamental it was. The reason, most probably was because physicists bundle Kepler's Rule with Kepler's other two "laws" and call it «Kepler's third law».

30. But Kepler's third law, is different than the other two.

31. With Kepler’s Third Law you can compute orbits, not with the other two. To make this distinction clear, I call what physicists call “Kepler's third law" Kepler's Rule. After all it is a rule, that is, a proportionality.

32. Newton was a hoaxer. He computed orbits with kinematical Kepler's Rule and then he said that he computed orbits with his dynamical force and that orbits were dynamical.

32. Newton became the new Aristotle of the European scholasticism. Professional academics who call themselves «physicists» today are dedicated disciples of Newton. They are part of the cult of Newton. Because anyone who believes in a miracle purely because he considers Newton's authority sacred can only be a cult member.

33. Einstein developed his theories to get rid of the Newtonian miracle. Einstein thought that such a supernatural miracle has no place in physics. But we see that Einstein was unsuccessful against the cult of Newton because just the opposite happened because Newtonian cultists stuck their Newtonist flag called the constant of force G into Einstein's equations that rejected the Newtonist force.

34. Newtonism is still going strong.

35. So, I started by denying the Newtonian force, and 40 years later, I still believe the same two fundamental principles: Motion can only be transferred, no new motion can be created and nothing happens without time passing. Newton's force contradicts both of these principles, so Newton's force must be a supernatural miracle. And Newton said as much. Newton claimed that the cause of gravity was God.

36. I'm on the side of Huygens, Leibniz, and Einstein who denied Newton's absurd notion of force.

37. Newtonism is a scholastic cult.

38. Physicists are dedicated priests of the cult of Newton. Let them deny this.

39. Physicists have total monopoly on topics that are accepted as "physical" topics. “Gravity” and “Newton” are such topics. No layman can question physicists' monopoly on these subjects. So if I state a historical truth and say that «in the Principia Newton did not use a force term to compute orbits» a physicist with enough authority can overrule this true statement. He never read the Principia but he has monopoly on Newton so he will defend his Master's authority.

40. If I say that «Henry Cavendish did not compute G» as all the textbooks claim --G was not even defined in Cavendish's time-- a physicist with enough rank and seniority will overrule this historical fact and claim that Cavendish computed G or he could have, even if he actually didn't. This physicist never read Cavendish's original article. Physics is done by authority.

41. Physics is a closed knowledge field. Professionals hide knowledge wholesale and sell it retail by teaching. In order to teach they must hide knowledge. This is how scholasticism work.

42. One day physicists too will see that Newton fooled them and that for 300 years they have been believing in a miracle the cause of which is God and they have been explaining natural phenomena with this miracle because they are afraid of questioning Newton's authority.

43. But physics will not change and cleanse itself because I say so; physics will go through its scientific revolution when an enlightened physicist will dare to question the Newtonist doctrines of his cult.

44. But, my aim has never been to criticize physics. 

45. Physics is a proffesional field, it has its own sacred text, rather two sacred texts, written by two demi-gods of physics, Newton and Einstein, and a physicist’s sole objective is to advance in the academic hierarchy by writing commentary to these demi-gods. 

46. The problem is these professionals who call themselves physicists have an absolute monopoly on Newton and Einstein and all of the subjects these two wrote about. One of these subjects is motion. Newton defined motion to be forceful. Newton defined orbits to be forceful and dynamical. Someone like me who says that “we compute orbits with Kepler’s Rule, and Kepler’s Rule is kinematical and not dynamical therefore orbits are kinematical” has no chance of discussing this topic with professionals. Maybe what I’m saying is stupid and wrong and a professional physicist can convince me to its wrongness. But I don’t accept argument by authority and physicists argue solely by authority. 

47. Physics is strictly hierarchical. The rules of professional interactions in physics are defined by rank and seniority. Authority is sacred. The senior physicist tells you what to do and you do it. You must respect absolutely the authority of your seniors. Physicists communicate with students by teaching them the doctrine. You never allow the questioning of the doctrine in class. Any student questioning the doctrine persistently is eliminated, he cannot be a physicist. And you never demean your profession by communicating with lowly creatures who are not professional physicists, you call them “cranks” and “crackpots”.

48. So I have no intenion of asking anything to these neo-scholastics who call themselves “physicists”. I’m trying to understand for myself. That’s all. And as soon as I convince myself, either way, I’ll move on to doing other things.

49. Orbits are explained perfectly well with Kepler's Rule. Kepler's Rule is kinematical, therefore, orbits are kinematical.

50. Can you deny that orbits are calculated using only the period T and the radius R of the orbit by using the proportionality $R^3 \propto T^2$ ? Can you deny that Kepler's Rule is kinematical and that it does not contain a force term? You cannot. Only fools and physicists can.

51. Physics has no standard of falsification. A physicist can use his authority, he can say, «this is wrong I can prove but you cannot understand the sophsticated and beatiful(!) mathematics I will be using so take my word for it and shut up.» This is how physics work. 

52. That physics theories must make observable predictions is propaganda too. Physicists define experiments to give the results they want. The best example is the Cavendish experiment. 

53. So we must ignore physicists, the corrupters of the old science of physics, the corrupters of mathematics and geometry, and the corrupters of the English language and develop our own standards of proofs.

54. I have to try to do that next. 

Multiverse

Soap bubble universes!

Ethan Siegel writes about "Multiverse", an absurd and meaningless word invented by physicists. Multiverse is short for "Multiple Universes".

But the word universe does not have a plural. Let me give you an example: You know that the sentence "there is only one Gods," is a grammatical error because you state that there is only one God but you write God in plural form as Gods. If there is only one God, the word God cannot have a plural.

The same is true for the word universe. The word universe cannot have a plural because there can only be one whole. It's a grammatical error to write "there are multiple wholes." There is only one whole. The following definition is true:

The Universe = The Whole = The Totality

The Multiverse (Multiple Universes) hypothesis is not a physics concept; it is a grammatical error.

Ethan Siegel first pretends to sound scientific before pushing his absurd notions:

Sure, you might say it's inherently unscientific to say something entirely outside our observable Universe must exist.

That's right. Something which is outside the knowable universe is unknowable. And in science an unknowable is unknowable. But not in physics. Because a physicist is someone who claims to know what he defined as unknowable. The word "charlatan" perfectly defines anyone who claims to know what he admitted he does not know.

Then, Ethan Siegel abandons his brief foray into scientific thinking and justifies his Multiverse by saying "but we know the rules. And they tell us that [a Multiverse must exist.]
...........................

The exact quote from the article:

Sure, you might say it's inherently unscientific to say something entirely outside our observable Universe must exist. But we know the rules. And this is what they tell us.

.........................

My comments:

1. Multiverse is not a physics problem, it's a linguistic problem. It's grammatical error.

2. You first define the word "universe" as "everything that exists" then you say that "there is something else outside of everything that exists."

3. You now defined the word universe as "not everything that exists" because you are saying that there is something outside of "everything that exists."

4. This way you equated "universe" and its opposite "not-universe" to be the same thing. (Nothing can be itself and not-itself at the same time. I know that physicists proudly disregard this fundamental rule of logic. For a physicist, it is perfectly logical to assume that there is something outside of everything that exists.)

5. What you are doing is not science. It's not even physics. It is rhetorical sophistry and linguistic sleight of hand. You are corrupting words by defining them multiple times.

6. You corrupted the good old word "universe" and made it meaningless and unusable.

7. If you find yourself talking about something existing outside of what you defined as the totality, you must stop immediately and reconsider your definition of the totality. If there is something outside of your totality, then your totality ain't no totality.

8. To say, as you do, that the totality is not the totality, is not even sophistry; it's more vile and disgusting than sophistry.

8. It's not even doubletalk; even doubletalk has some respectability; yours is outright fraud.

9. And the fact that you try to couch your fraud and abuse of language with scientific sounding mumbojumbo puts you in the realm of religious dogmatists.

10. No. Not even that.

11. You act more like a shaman.

12. But not even that.

13. Shamans never pretended to be scientists.

14. You screw science.

15. You screw the language.

16. You screw logic.

17. And you want us to believe that this stinky garbage you are selling as Multiverse is science. (The word universe does not have a plural. You cannot have multiple wholes. But "Multiverse" is short for "Multiple Universes", therefore, Multiverse is absurd by definition.)

18. I realize that it is impossible for you, and physicists in general, to understand and admit that the word "whole" includes the whole. It's a grammatical error to say "multiple wholes." It's a grammatical error to say "multiple universes." You cannot build a physical theory over a grammatical error.

19. There is nothing outside the whole. There is nothing not included in the totality. This is by definition.

20. If there is something outside the whole then what you previously called the whole was not the whole.

21. When you understand this fact, and admit that the whole is the whole and the whole is not the part, go ahead and correct your article accordingly.

Notes:

--- The referenced article by Ethan Siegel: This Is Why The Multiverse Must Exist. Twitter link.

Physics is a prediction game

1. Academic physics is a prediction game.

2. Physicists make predictions by rearranging the symbols in an equation and sooner or later they find what they predicted —as if they put it there themselves— by fitting it into some white noise collected by an expensive machine built by the government for them to find what they predicted.

3. Physics boils down to data analysis.

4. Some of these predictions are more like divination or prophesy but we'll get to that in another article.

5. The nicest thing about being a physicist is that as soon as you become a Doctor of Philosophy, these magic letters (PhD) at the end of your name endow you with a magnificient power to corrupt any common word by redefining it; such a redefined word becomes the property of physics and cannot be understood or used by non-physicists.

6. In truth, a physicist is a linguist; he has the power to hijack and own any word by redefining it.

7. Some say that physicists corrupt the meanings of words to save their doctrines, just like their professional ancestors, the scholastic doctors of philosophy, the original anti-science.

8. But let's not be so harsh to these neo-scholastics who call themselves physicists because they thread the fine line between prediction and divination.

9. For instance, physicists redefined what we knew as the "scientific method" as the "not the scientific method".

10. They defined the negation of science as science.

11. Power corrupts and power over language corrupts absolutely.

12. Therefore, academic physicists are the most corrupt corrupters of humanity's knowledge bank.

13. I want to show you this with an example.

14. Let's suppose that physicists look at a tree in order to predict what kind of fruit that tree will produce.

15. As always physicists start by writing down Einstein's Field Equations appropriate for that field and they select a suitable set of solutions; they linearalize Einstein's equations because they cannot solve the original non-linear form of the equations; they add as many free parameters as necessary; they naturalize and normalize to eliminate all the annoying infinities by inventing some Nobel prize worthy mathematical tricks --in short, they effectively castrate Einstein's equations but they still call it Einstein's equations-- and finally, they make their predictions.

16. In this case, the prediction is: "This is an apple tree. We predict that the branches of this tree will soon be weighed down with apples!"

17. No surprises here. The equations have more free parameters than the number of predicted apples on the tree; all these parameters can be tuned to make any and all predictions. If you can make any possible predictions that's no longer called a prediction, that's called a guess.

18. But there was a glitch: The equations predicted that this tree will produce potatoes.

19. After discussing the issue with high ranking experimentalists, our guys were told that potatoes grow underground not on trees.

20. This fact caused a great crisis in physics.

21. Was Einstein wrong?

22. No. That’s out of the question.

23. Einstein can never be wrong.

24. Even Einstein's admitted blunders are turned into constants of nature by his disciples. Einstein is always right. Nature is wrong.

25. Then physicists asked: Are we on the cusp of new physics? What can we do? Who can save physics from this crisis?

26. Who but the genius on the wheelchair! Hawking! And that's what happened.

27. After long debates, the most elegantly ad hoc fine tuning was selected and the free parameters were tuned accordingly and the resulting mathematical beauty entered the physics literature as the Hawking Conjecture.

28. According to the Hawking Conjecture a potato that falls into a black hole exits from its anti-black hole as an apple.

30. So what we see as a tree now had been an anti-black hole about 777 billion years ago.

31. The number 777 was a side effect of the Hawking Conjecture and now it is enthroned as the king of all dimensionless numbers in physics, surpassing even the Fine Structure Constant in fame and mystery.

32. But the importance of this number for us is that it points to a time many many big bangs ago because our big bang happened just a mere 14 billion years ago. But Hawking's bang is the most ancient bang that happened even before all the big bangs defined by physicists (hot, cold, lukewarm etc.).

33. By the way this type of projecting intractable problems into the unknowable past is an old trick physicists use to solve unsolvable problems. Because it is an axiom of physics that the more distant a problem is it is most precisely solvable. If you push the problem to 777 billion years ago you can explain it in unheard of precision.

34. In short, the real beginning of time where this original bang happened is now called Hawking Epoch.

35. The essential property of this epoch is that everything that happened then is reflected from our big bang as what might be called as "big bang lensing" so that everything that happened in the infinitely remote Hawking Epoch is encoded in the Cosmic Background radiation that we observe today. How convenient, isn't it? This is the beauty of physics.

36. We are referring to the big bang that happened in the cosmological epoch called Hawking multi-multiverse.

37. Multi-multiverse is the multiverse of multiverses, which is proved by the old turtle hypothesis of the old cosmology.

38. In other words, because we see things the way they were billions of years ago, we see this anti-black hole as a tree now.

39. No need to go into further details because you will not understand rigorous mathematical equations used by physicists to prove that potatoes do not grow on trees.

40. You have to take their word for it.

41. Now the correct prediction is made: This is an apple tree.

42. Finally, the time comes and the tree flowers and little buds appear... but holy spherical cow! What is this?

43. The tree does not know that it is an apple tree and it is populated with cherries!

44. Physicists ask their classic rhetorical question again: Can Einstein be wrong?

45. Out of the question. Impossible. Not in a billion years.

46. Although we bastardized poor Einstein's equations, we made them linear, we added so many free parameters that we could even prove the existence of gods, any god from Zeus to Yahweh to Allah; and there were no traces of the original equations left and we chose a spacetime that gave what we wanted and we used the sophistical powers and the supreme physical authority of Hawking to predict apples and this idiot tree gives us cherries!

47. Is physics in crisis again?

48. No. Don't panic. This is a minor problem that we know how to fix.

49. This is known as “Physics is Never Wrong Conjecture.”

50. This properly follows from the Copernican Principle coupled to Mach’s Principle.

51. This happens in physics all the time.

52. This is actually not a physics problem but a linguistic problem.

53. To solve it we simply define cherries as apples.

54. Yes, we can do this and we do it all the time.

55. For instance, we are particle physicists right?

56. We study particles.

57. We believe that the world is made of elementary particles and we are the priestly accountants who find and classify these particles.

58. If the world is not made of particles we'd be out of work.

59. But it turns out that the world is NOT made of particles!

60. Our own experiments show that the world is not made of particles but fields and excitations of these fields.

61. There are no particles in the form of spherical balls as we still believe and will always believe.

62. But no worries.

63. We just call these fields and excitations "particles" and we draw them as colorful spherical balls.

64. We indicate their spin with arrows even though in physics spin has nothing to do with the spin of a spherical ball.

65. We draw gluons as springs obeying Hook's law although they dont.

66. This is the scientific method.

67. The true scientific method as used in physics.

68. So we simply say that cherries are apples in the Higgs field because it is the Higgs field that gives a cherry its appleness.

69. And if you ask about my own research, I personally work on the hot new field of dark apples which is a new branch in the larger branch of Dark Physics. More specifically, I try to find  mathematical relations between cherry-apples and black holes.

59. Einstein equations predict that colliding black holes produce organic apples and NASA is in the process of converting LIGO into a machine that will cherry pick those organic apples produced in the Hawking Epoch.

60. By a fundamental law of physics Einstein must always reduce to Newton, so of course, dark apple theory reduces to classical mechanics as all theories must in speeds slower than speed of light and we get apples from Newton's orchard. (If you didn't understand this sentence, see the appendix for its formal mathematical version.)

61. Now what is left is to find the flavor of these black apples spewed from Schwrascschilhd radius. (All misspelling of Schwardchshdilds reduce to its correct spelling in the appropriate spelling radius.)

62. Are they Granny Smiths? No. They are a new kind of apples called Daddy Albert's. Daddy Albert's dark apples.

63. It’s unbelievable but true that  Lisa Randall just published a book on this very subject. Whoaoa! When did she even write it??

64. Doctor Randall explains us how dark apples are the cause of dark matter and dark energy and how these dark stuff is the cause of the extinction of dinosaurs. Dr. Randall is sure to be right because she also sells high quality extra dimensions. If the extinction of dinosaurs did not happen in one of the boring existing 4 dimensions, it must have happened in one of her high quality dimensions where anything can happen. 

65. Lisa Randall is one of the finest dark minds, so you should buy her book if you want to be enlightened. Yes, her dark mind can enlighten you. This is proved by Randall's Dark Mind Conjecture.

66. Yes, with the support of Lisa Randall, dark apple theory has become the best candidate to explain dark matter, in yet another most elegant circular reasoning so much loved by physicists.

67. After all they are both dark, right What other proof do you need?

68. But are there dark apples?

69. If there aren't we can easily define them and LIGO, now renamed APPL, will observe it for us.

70. Don't forget physics=science.